Percy (1989)

The only feature by Pervez Mehrwanji, a noted documentary and TV director who died shortly afterwards, is a melodrama set among Bombay’s minority Parsee community. Percy (Deboo) is an awkward youth dominated by his mother (Patel) and emasculated by the memory of a gross, pleasure-loving father (Vasunia). Employed by a small pharmaceutical business, he is tormented by a lumpenised Maharashtrian (through whom the film refers to Maharashtra’s Hindu Shiv Sena Party). When the hero causes the other man to be sacked, he is beaten up on the street. He finds some solace for his loneliness by joining a motley bunch of Western classical music enthusiasts. The film intercuts his actual experiences with his dreams and fantasies, the last one (in which he resurrects a dead school friend, Dara) urging him to jettison his pervasive sense of guilt. The two realities are separated and merged mainly via Contractor’s masterful camerawork. The film has several well-known actors from Bombay’s Parsee theatre and deploys the characteristic self-mocking idiom of Parsee popular plays.